Tuesday, September 23rd, 2003

Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before

In celebration of Rough Trade’s 25th anniversary, they are releasing a compilation album of tracks by past Rough Trade artists covered by current Rough Trade artists. Some highlights of the 16-track album are:

The Hidden Cameras – “Dunes” (Originally by The Clean)

The Tyde – “Tell Me” (Originally by Galaxie 500)

Royal City – “Is This It” (Originally by The Strokes)

British Sea Power – “Tugboat” (Originally by Galaxie 500 )

Belle & Sebastian – “Final Day” (Originally by Young Marble Giants)

Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before is out October 7 and should be discount priced.

Update: This comp is actually out today – prices online range from $11.99 to $15.99 CAN.

The video for the new REM song “Bad Day” has its own minisite at www.morningteam.com. It’s a pretty good song in the old-school stripped down REM vein. Yeah, it sounds fairly like “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And it’s a fun video. “Bad Day” is one of the new tracks on the best-of compilation, In Time, out October 28.

Madness at the subway station today. Lineups winding every which way as for whatever reason, there weren’t enough streetcars to clear up the backlog. No one had any idea where the line started or ended and resorted to just standing behind people at random, hoping to start a new lineup. To top it off, there was this woman walking around with no top teeth except her canines, going through the garbage bins. She was just peculiar. I did run into former Lake Holiday keyboardist Brendan in line though, and got to congratulate him on his recent wedding, so it wasn’t a total waste of time. I eventually gave up waiting and took the subway down to St. Andrew and then the streetcar across King. I suspect the folks in Spadina station are still waiting.

There was a streetcar derailment this morning at Queen and Spadina which blocked all northbound spadina traffic and all queen street traffic.

It’s a pretty nasty bit of business getting one of those things moved back onto the rails. No idea how it came off.

It took over 2 hours for them to get things moving again (I looked out of the window at work from time to time to catch up on the progress, but I missed the actual placing of the car back on the tracks, sadly)

"Bad Day" sounds so much like old REM because it’s a holdover from the 1986 <i>Life’s Rich Pageant</i> sessions. They’ve been playing it live on occasion for years, but decided to go in a record a modernized version because, apparently, they can’t write ’em like this anymore.